Dr Jo Blanden

Biography

Biography

Jo Blanden graduated from the University of East Anglia in 1998; she then studied for a Masters degree in Economics at University College London. From 2000 to 2005 she was a full-time researcher in the Centre for Economic Performance (CEP) at the London School of Economics and completed her PhD at UCL over this time. She joined the Department of Economics at Surrey in October 2005 and is a Visiting Fellow at the LSE.

Research interests

Jo's research interests lie broadly in the fields of labour and family economics. Jo's PhD was on the topic of intergenerational income mobility. Her work with Paul Gregg and Steve Machin on 'Changes in Intergenerational Mobility in Britain' found that the relationship between family income and children's adult earnings has strengthened for those born in 1970 compared to those born in 1958; this finding has attracted a large amount of policy and media interest. Jo's recent paper with Stephen Machin (January 2017), on 'Home Ownership and Social Mobility' found that home ownership rates have fallen rapidly. For individuals born in 1970 home ownership rates shrunk disproportionately for those whose parents were not home owners when they were children. These results reinforce a picture of falling social mobility in Britain. Jo's work in this area is featured in a new book by Lee Elliot Major and Stephen Machin, Social Mobility and its Enemies.

Jo is currently concluding a research grant funded by the Nuffield Foundation to look at the impact of nursery attendance on children's outcomes (with Sandra McNally and Kirstine Hansen) which has become part of a broader collaboration with Birgitta Rabe and Emilia Del Bono. The research indicates that the £2bn a year invested in part-time early education appears to have quite small educational benefits as well as showing that the standard measures of nursery quality are not as important for children's outcomes as we might expect. As free nursery places for three year olds fail to deliver lasting educational benefits, Jo Blanden's article in The Telegraph argues we need to see a sensible approach to early years policy. The three papers from this project are:

This paper flatly contradicts the common view that anyone can make it in modern Britain. Indeed, rather then weakening, the link between an individual's earnings and those of his or her parents has strengthened. An important part of the explanation is that the expansion of higher education has benefited people from rich families much more than those from poor families. The extent of intergenerational mobility is frequently seen as a measure of the degree of equality of opportunity in society and considerable research has been devoted to obtaining an accurate estimate of it for a number of countries. However little is known about how these connections have altered through time. Sharp increases in educational attainment and rises in earnings (and living standards in general) in more recent generations mean that many observers seem to think that we now live in a more mobile, meritocratic society than in the past. Contrary to this, this research seems to show that where you come from matters more now than in the past. It appears that the extent of intergenerational mobility has actually fallen. The research uses unique data that follow two cohorts of children (one born in 1958, one born in 1970) through childhood and into adulthood. The latest data, collected in 2000, make it possible, for the first time, for researchers to get a good measure of the adult earnings of the second cohort. The key findings are: [1]The connection between earnings and parental income has strengthened for the more recent cohort. Estimates of the relationship between childhood family income and son's adult earnings show that for the 1958 cohort, a son from a family with twice as much income as a second family will earn about 12 percent more in his early thirties than a son from the second family. In the 1970 cohort, the same figure is 25 percent. Therefore, the degree of intergenerational transmission has risen by 13 percentage points. Results for daughters are very similar; [2] Part of the fall in mobility across generations is due to the fact that the expansion of the higher education system has benefited people from rich fa milies much more than those from poor families. This is particularly the case for daughters. The results show that differences in educational attainment across family background have led to a decline in equality of opportunity. This is despite the large expansion in postcompulsory schooling that occurred between the two cohorts. This may be unexpected to some ob

In this paper we investigate whether young people whose fathers are union members are themselves more likely to join a union. The work builds upon a large social science literature on intergenerational mobility that, to ourknowledge, has not been applied to industrial relations questions. The paper asks questions and provides evidence from British longitudinal data on several issues to do with the cross-generation transmission of union status:i) We first calculate odds ratios, as often used in the literature on social mobility, to look at empirical connections between the union status of young people and their fathers. We calculate relative risk ratios that measure the relative chances that a child of a unionized father is unionized as compared to the relative chances of the child of a non-union father being unionized. This relative risk ratio is of the order of 2, showing that young people with unionized fathers are twice as likely to be unionized as those with non-union fathers. ii) The relative risk ratio is higher, at over 3, for young people with fathers who report themselves as being active in a union. To the extent that active in a union fathers are more likely to 'spread the word' about unions to their offspring, this higher relative risk ratio supports the idea that the socialization within the family during the formative years passes on positive knowledge about unions to children of unionized parents making them more likely to join a union. iii) The intergenerational correlation of union status has not reduced over time. Despite a widening of the union membership gap between older and younger workers, relative risk ratios calculated from early 1980s data are no larger than those from the 1990s. iv) The cross-generation correlation is not driven by common within-family characteristics (like occupation, industry and political persuasion) that are strongly related to union status in the data.

The book sheds light on how the social and economic mobility of children differs within and across counties and the impact private family resources, public policies, and social institutions may have on mobility.

This paper investigates whether young people whose fathers are union members are themselves more likely to join a union. We find that young people with unionized fathers are twice as likely to be unionized as those with non-union fathers and that this rises to three times higher for those whose fathers are active in the union. This supports the idea that socialization within the family plays a role in encouraging union membership. It is not the case that the cross-generation correlations we observe are driven by common within-family characteristics (like occupation, industry and political persuasion) that are strongly related to union membership. X-PublishedAs-Type: article X-PublishedAs-Journal: British journal of industrial relations X-PublishedAs-Year: 2003 X-PublishedAs-Volume: 41 X-PublishedAs-Pages: 391-415

Blanden J, Gregg P, Machin SChanges in Educational Inequality,

This paper looks at changes over time in the extent of educational inequality - defined as educational attainment by people from higher relative to lower income backgrounds. It draws upon household and longitudinal data sources in both the UK and US to look at this highly policy relevant question. The data shows a sharp rise in educational inequality over time in the UK, but with the stage of the education sequence mattering. In particular the rapid expansion of higher education seen in the recent past in the UK disproportionately benefited children from relatively affluent backgrounds. The international comparisons show different patterns of change in the association between education and family income over time in the UK relative to the US. We link these findings on changes in educational inequality to the literature on intergenerational mobility, arguing that international differences in educational systems matter for the extent of economic and social mobility across generations.

The recent literature on intergenerational mobility in the UK has been focused on measuring the level and change in the relationship between parental income and children?s earnings as adults among recent cohorts. This paper is the first to analyse in detail the factors that generate these links. The paper seeks to account for the level of income persistence in the 1970 BCS cohort and also to explore the decline in mobility in the UK between the 1958 NCDS cohort and the 1970 cohort. The mediating factors considered are childhood health, cognitive skills, non-cognitive traits, educational attainment and labour market attachment. We find that these variables together explain slightly more than half of the intergenerational link for men. Changes in the relationships between these variables, parental income and earnings are able to explain three quarters of the rise in intergenerational persistence across the cohorts. The increased persistence in the second cohort comes from an increased influence of parental income in determining educational attainment, especially higher education, and labour market attachment. It is also clear that the stronger relationship between parental income and education comes in part through the growing relationship between parental income and the non-cognitive characteristics that influence education outcomes.

Blanden JBig ideas: intergenerational mobility,

Jo Blanden traces the evolution of CEP research on social mobility and its interaction with policy debate.

The book compares whether and how parents' resources transmit advantage to their children at different stages of development and sheds light on the structural differences among countries that may influence intergenerational mobility.

This article seeks evidence on trends in intergenerational income for cohorts born after 1970. As many of these cohorts have not yet joined the labour market, we must look at relationships between intermediate outcomes (degree attainment, test scores and non-cognitive abilities) and parental income to forecast forward from these to estimates of intergenerational earnings correlations. We find no evidence that the relationship between these intermediate outcomes and parental income have changed for more recent cohorts. Evidence from the earlier 1958 and 1970 cohorts shows that as mobility declined in the past the relationship between intermediate outcomes and parental income strengthened. We therefore conclude that, under realistic assumptions and in the absence of any significant unanticipated changes, the decline in intergenerational mobility that occurred between 1958 and 1970 birth cohorts is unlikely to continue for cohorts born from 1970 to 2000. Mobility is therefore likely to remain at or near the relatively low level observed for the 1970 birth cohort.

This paper compares and contrasts estimates of the extent of intergenerational income mobility over time in Britain. Estimates based on two British birth cohorts show that mobility appears to have fallen in a cross-cohort comparison of people who grew up in the 1960s and 1970s (the 1958 birth cohort) as compared to a cohort who grew up in the 1970s and 1980s (the 1970 birth cohort). The sensitivity of labour market earnings to parental income rises, thereby showing less intergenerational mobility for the more recent cohort. This supports theoretical notions that the widening wage and income distribution that occurred from the late 1970s onwards slowed down the extent of mobility up or down the distribution across generations.

This paper investigates the returns to lifelong learning, which is interpreted as the attainment of qualifications following entry into the labour market. For a number of reasons our analysis of the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) represents an important addition to the existing evidence base. We allow for financial and non-financial returns to lifelong learning by using as dependent variables both (i) hourly earnings and (ii) CAMSIS score. A fixed effects specification counters the potential biases that arise from unobserved individual heterogeneity and the inclusion of lags allows estimation of how the returns to lifelong learning evolve over a ten year period after the qualification is obtained. We find evidence of earnings and occupation status returns using a broad categorisation of lifelong learning for both men and women, but more variability in returns when disaggregated NVQ-equivalent categories of qualification are considered. Our findings are broadly in line with existing evidence within the UK, which is mostly based on the analysis of cohort studies. 0f particular interest is the finding that returns to women materialise much sooner after the attainment of a qualification, than is the case for their male counterparts.

Collectively, these volumes provide an authoritative understanding of how public policy in Britain has changed over the last decade while offering bold ideas to meet the next decade's challenges.

Blanden JHow Much Can We Learn from International Comparisons of Intergenerational Mobility?,

This paper summarises research on the relative level of intergenerational mobility - whether classified by income, social class, social status or education - considering observations from 65 countries. With the exception of social class, the different approaches reveal similar patterns. South America, other developing nations, southern European countries and France tending to have rather limited mobility while the Nordic countries exhibit strong mobility. Evidence for the US and Germany differs across the measures, with Germany immobile on education and class and fairly mobile on income and the reverse true for the US. These differences are likely explained by greater within-group income inequality and persistence in the US. The second part of the paper finds that mobility is negatively correlated with inequality and the returns to education and positively correlated with a nation's education spending.

London is an educational success story, with especially good schooling results for more disadvantaged pupils. This is a dramatic reversal of fortunes. This paper uses a combination of administrative and survey data to document these improvements and understand more about why the performance of disadvantaged pupils in London has improved so much.

· First of all we consider the timing of the improvement. We show that the London advantage for poor children was present in primary and secondary schools from the mid-1990s. This is well before the introduction of many recent policies that have previously been cited as the reasons for London?s success, such as the London Challenge or Academies programme.

· Differences in the ethnic mix of pupils can explain some of the higher level of performance, but only about one sixth of the growth over time. Instead, the majority is explained by rising prior attainment (pupils entering secondary school with better age 11 test scores) and a reduced negative contribution of having many disadvantaged children in school.

· Data from the Millennium Cohort Study shows that disadvantaged pupils in London have no advantage compared to those in the rest of England at age 5, but then show faster improvements between age 5 and 11 once they have started school.

· Taken together, our evidence suggests improvements in London?s schools seem to be mainly attributable to gradual improvements in school quality rather than differences or changes in the effects of pupil and family characteristics.

· Closer examination of the policies and practice in London from the mid to late 1990s could provide valuable lessons as to how educational performance can be boosted among disadvantaged groups.

The 70 contributors are each well-regarded economists whose research has advanced the topic on which they write, and this book fulfills an undersupplied niche for a text in the economics of education.

Blanden J, Gregg P, Macmillan LIntergenerational Persistence in Income and Social Class: The Impact of Within-Group Inequality,

Family income is found to be more closely related to sons? earnings for a cohort born in 1970 compared to one born in 1958. This result is in stark contrast to the finding on the basis of social class; intergenerational mobility for this outcome is found to be unchanged. Our aim here is to explore the reason for this divergence. We derive a formal framework which relates mobility in measured family income/earnings to mobility in social class. Building on this framework we then test a number of alternative hypotheses to explain the difference between the trends, finding evidence of an increase in the intergenerational persistence of the permanent component of income that is unrelated to social class. We reject the hypothesis that the observed decline in income mobility is a consequence of the poor measurement of permanent family income in the 1958 cohort.

Blanden J, Gregg PFamily Income and Educational Attainment: A Review of Approaches and Evidence for Britain,

It is widely recognised that, on average, children from poorer backgrounds have worse educational outcomes than their better off peers. There is less evidence on how this relationship has changed over time and, indeed, what exactly leads to these inequalities. In this paper we demonstrate that the correlation between family background (as measured by family income) and educational attainment has been rising between children born in the late 1950s and those born two decades later. The remainder of the paper is spent considering the extent to which these associations are due to the causal effects of income rather than the result of other dimensions of family background. We review the approaches taken to answering this question, drawing mainly in the US literature, and then present our own evidence from the UK, discussing the plausible range for the true impact of income on education. Our results indicate that income has a causal relationship with educational attainment.

This paper reports results from a recent survey we conducted on the union status of over 650 firms in the private sector of the UK. Compared to earlier periods, the survey shows that since 1997 there has been a slight fall in derecognition, but a relatively large increase in union recognition. Almost 11% of firms report experiencing some new recognition, whilst 7% reported some derecognition. In the late 1980s new recognitions among similar firms were much lower (3% between 1985 to 1990 according to Gregg and Yates, 1991). In our survey, new recognitions were more prevalent in larger firms and in regions and industries where union membership was already high. New recognitions were less likely to have occurred in companies with higher wages, higher productivity and higher capital intensity. The 'blip up' in new recognitions is consistent with the idea that the incoming Labour government had a positive effect on the ability of unions to gain recognition, either through the 1999 legislation or more indirectly through changing the political climate.

Blanden J, Haveman R, Smeeding T, Wilson K(2013)Intergenerational Mobility in the United States and Great Britain: A Comparative Study of Parent-Child Pathways, Review of Income and Wealth Wiley-Blackwell

This paper makes use of matched tax-return data for daughters, their parents, their partners and their partners' parents to investigate the interactions between intergenerational mobility and marital matching for young couples in Canada. We show how assortative mating contributes to intergenerational household income persistence. The strength of the association between sons-in-law's income and women's parental income means that the intergenerational link between household incomes is stronger than that found for daughters' own incomes alone. This is also the case when viewed from the other side, so that daughters' and their partners' earnings are related to partners' parental income. These results indicate that assortative matching magnifies individual-level intergenerational persistence.

In the second part of the paper we consider assortative mating by parental income. We find that daughter's parental income has an elasticity of almost 0.2 with respect to her partner's parental income. This association is of approximately the same magnitude as the intergenerational link between parents' and children's incomes. We investigate variations in the correlation between the parental incomes across several measured dimensions; cohabiting couples have lower correlations, as do those who form partnerships early, those who live in rural areas and most interestingly, those who later divorce. We interpret this last result as evidence that, on average, couples with parental incomes that are more similar enjoy a more stable match.

Blanden J, Gregg P, Macmillan LIntergenerational Persistence in Income and Social Class: The Impact of Increased Inequality,

Sociologists and economists reach quite different conclusions about how intergenerational mobility in the UK compares for those growing up in the 1970s and 1980s. Persistence in social class is found to be unchanged while family income is found to be more closely related to sons? earnings for those born in 1970 compared to those born in the 1958. We investigate the reasons for the contrast and find that they are not due to methodological differences or data quality. Rather, they are explained by the increased importance of differences in income within social class for sons? earnings in the second cohort. When economists measure intergenerational mobility their ideal is to see how permanent income is transmitted across generations. Our investigations show that the importance of within-social class differences in income mean that a single measure of income is a better predictor of permanent income status than fathers? social class. We would not, therefore, expect the results for changes in intergenerational mobility based on income and social class to necessarily coincide.

Blanden J, Gregg P, Macmillan L(2013)Intergenerational Persistence in Income and Social Class: The Impact of Within-Group Inequality, Journal of Royal Statistical Society Series A: Statistics in Society176(2)pp. 541-563 John Wiley and Sons

Family income is found to be more closely related to sons' earnings for a cohort born in 1970 compared to one born in 1958. This result is in stark contrast to the finding on the basis of social class; intergenerational mobility for this outcome is found to be unchanged. Our aim here is to explore the reason for this divergence. We derive a formal framework which relates mobility in measured family income/earnings to mobility in social class. Building on this framework we then test a number of alternative hypotheses to explain the difference between the trends, finding evidence of an increase in the intergenerational persistence of the permanent component of income that is unrelated to social class. We reject the hypothesis that the observed decline in income mobility is a consequence of the poor measurement of permanent family income in the 1958 cohort.

This book provides an overview of the key issues concerning the performance of the labour market and policy in the UK, with focus on the 2008 financial crisis, the ensuing recession, and its aftermath.

This paper summarizes research on the relative level of intergenerational mobility - whether classified by income, education or social class. The literatures on education and income mobility reveal a similar ranking with South America, other developing nations, southern European countries and France tending to have rather limited mobility although the Nordic countries exhibit strong mobility. Estimates of mobility based on social class point to rather different patterns, and we demonstrate that these differences are most likely generated by intergenerational earnings persistence within social classes. The second part of the paper looks for explanations for the differences in earnings and education persistence and finds that mobility is negatively correlated with inequality and the return to education but positively correlated with a nation's education spending.

This thesis documents the evolution of absolute mobility in individual earnings, household income and household consumption in the UK over the last 25 years. Absolute mobility is defined as the fraction of children earning as much or more than the parents, in real times at a similar point in the life-cycle, and is calculated using the decomposition technique introduced by Chetty, Grusky, et al. (2017). In Chapter 1, I show that absolute earnings mobility was increasing until the mid-2000s, and then plummeted due to the fall in real weekly earnings after the Great Recession. In 2018, absolute earnings mobility was only 36 percent, about 22 percentage points lower than in 2008. This decline in absolute earnings mobility could have been avoided if real weekly earnings had continued to grow at the pre-recession trend. In Chapter 2, I show that absolute income mobility was higher in levels than absolute earnings mobility, and the measure did not experience the steep decline over the last decade. This gap between absolute earnings and income mobility can be partly explained by the inclusion of non-labour earnings and welfare transfers in household incomes, which were higher in the children?s generation compared to the parents. In addition, the rise in labour force participation of women combined with the tremendous growth in their earnings meant that dual-income households played a major role in raising and stabilizing the level of absolute income mobility.

The final chapter in this thesis investigates the effect of an early-life climate shock on mother?s breastfeeding behaviour and children?s anthropometric measures. I use the 1998 flood in Bangladesh as a natural experiment to implement the difference-in-difference framework. I find that children affected by the flood were breastfed for longer than those unaffected. In addition, contrary to previous studies, children did not report any difference in height-for-age z-scores, but had lower weight-for-age z-scores. Increased breastfeeding by mothers, along with generous assistance in the form of food and finances from the government, ensured that children did not suffer from the severe negative effect common in such extreme weather events.